Sometimes I have to laugh at people's perception of illness and disease. I've been treating patients for nearly 20 years and people come to my office every day amazed that they've become sick. It is almost with superstitious foreboding that they describe how they suddenly got sick, as if some lurking creature was lying in wait to pounce, unsuspecting on them. Then Wham! They're sick. And they often are truly puzzled at how they could have gotten sick.

For those of us who have been studying health, injury and illness, not much comes as a surprise. Our health is usually the results of positive or negative consequences based on our lifestyle, genetics and habits. The difficulty lies in changing those behaviors, which lead to illness and disease, and replacing them with a health-promoting lifestyle. The irony is that our upbringing and family history can pattern our unhealthy behavior. Add to this the ever-present insidious influence of advertisers and marketing and our health is sure to decline.

There are two approaches to treating illness. The first, which is used primarily by the medical profession, is to attack the offending organism or symptom. If you have pain, you are given a drug for pain. If you have congestion, a decongestant. Whatever symptom you have, there seems to be a drug to counteract it. If you have a diseased organ, gallbladder, appendix, spleen, colon, it can be removed surgically. And then there are drugs and medical procedures to help you cope with the aftermath. This approach is not limited to drugs and surgery. Many who claim and use natural approaches to treating illness are simply substituting an herb for a drug to treat the symptom in the same way medicine would. They are just using something "natural" rather than a pharmaceutical.

The other approach, which we favor, is to build, nourish and support the body so that it will be able to heal on its own. This is done by nourishing the body with an abundance of nutrients - by using a supplement such as SuperNutrition. We know that every day our body reproduces billions of cells. Occasionally one or more of these cells is less than perfect. Sometimes, a lot less. Our bodies have within them something called an immune system. This network of tissues, hormones, and nervous pathways is designed to keep the body healthy and strong - in essence, it is our survival system. When a bad cell is produced (like a cancer cell) or introduced (like a harmful virus or bacteria) into the body, it is the immune system's job to search and destroy. It is only when our immune system becomes overburdened or stressed that it begins to let things slip through it's defenses. Which is okay, because the immune system has multiple back-up systems and redundancy built in to protect you and ensure survival. When our health becomes severly compromised from years of neglect, we begin to have problems which are difficult to recover from.

Another aspect of natural health care is to cleanse or detoxify the body. Simply put, natural healing is done by putting the good things in (nutrients) and getting the bad things out (toxins). By doing this we are able to unleash our bodies' inherent healing abilities and we get healthy. I know, I know, this is overly simplistic. However, I am convinced that we could eliminate 70% of unnecessary medical care if, as a people (Americans), we would eat right and exercise. Most illness, particularly chronic illness, is preventable. Notice, I did not say curable - although I believe that too, but most illness can be prevented. And as we all know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Nourishing your body and eliminating toxins, does not address the mental or emotional factors of our illness. Nor does it address what I call faulty programming in our immune system - which is what happens with allergies. I compare allergies to a computer virus. If you open an email that happens to have a virus attached, it may hide itself on your computer hard drive until it is activated, usually by changing the date or accessing a certain file or program. Once activated the computer virus causes its problems. An allergy is nothing more than a faulty program that gets written on your immune system. As long as you are not exposed to the trigger, you do not have symptoms. But if you do get exposed to grass, corn, milk, etc., the immune system reacts causing the allergic symptoms. The key to the effective treatment of allergies, is not to take drugs which suppress the symptoms and introduce a plethora of side effects, but to change the programming. This can be done by nourishing and boosting the immune system - Taking SuperNutrition and Immune Boost 2 to 3 times daily. We also recommend our Allergy Formula or Sinus Allergy Formulas to help manage the symptoms.

~ Dr. Kyle D. Christensen ~

"Herbal first Aid is insightful, clear, and an easy to follow resource book on herbs. It covers herbal lifesaving techniques, storage of herbal remedies and ancient herbal wisdom. This book is a must for alternative health practitioners and I am looking forward to having it in my collection of books on remedies and first aid". - Ellen w. Cutler, D.C. Author of The Food Allergy Cure